Coming over on the boat this morning with the rain lashing down and Rousay barely visible through the mist wasn't the best start to the day, we ended up losing the first couple of hours due to the site being even more under water than usual.
It did clear up to a certain extent after a while, so back we went, although the mist and damp kept rolling in all day. We spent all day clearing off more of the beach, made easier by the removal of a fair bit of the overburden by the machine earlier in the week.
We have some of the other old hands back on site too, in particular Alice, who was looking forward to our (cancelled) 2020 season as it would've been her 10th year at Swandro, her 20th year in archaeology and her 30th birthday all rolled into one - that would've been a great party, but sadly not to be, but at least she's back now:
We also had Bonnie and Rose back, and the fact that Rose is wearing both sunglasses and waterproof trousers just highlights the capriciousness of the Orkney weather
It did eventually improve enough that we could start to carefully tidy up the inside of the roundhouse, it's really hard on the claggy middens in the wet, earlier in the day there was standing water in there, but the brisk wind soon dried them up:
Here's hoping for a spell of decent settled weather so we can crack on with the excavation!